Acquired Taste
by Jateshi
Summary: The best things tea, lovers are always a blend of bitter and sweet. LuciusSeverus vignette.


**Title:** Acquired Taste   
**Author:** Jateshi (you know, me)   
**Characters:** Lucius/Severus   
**Rating:** G  
**Warning:** There's a gasp implied relationship. What? There's nothing else! Uh...well, maybe a disparaging view of American drinking habits. -shrugs- I've got tons of those. Oh, no HBP spoilers folks, this was written _way_ before HBP came out.  
**Disclaimer:** As much as I would kill love to claim it, I am not J. K. Rowling. We might both write in a coffee shoppe but she's definitely her and I'm definitely me. I do solemnly promise to return Severus and Lucius at some point in the future, and in the same shape I got them in, but it sure as hell isn't going to be anytime soon. -g-   
**Dedicated** to Cravache (aka Toni), the influence which has given me a complete, utter, and eternal love of Snucius.

**Summary:** The best things - tea, lovers - are always a blend of bitter and sweet.

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Late in the night I dreamed of tea - first it was merely the idea of it, a slip into the middle of an otherwise undecipherable darkness. Soon it was the scent of a freshly steeped cup, a vague impression of _warmth_ like a saucer and cup set just beyond the scope of my vision. And ever so slowly it became more, a pungent scent of herbs, acidic and teasing as they washed over my senses.

Colonists - I suppose they should be called "Americans" since that had been separated for a few hundred years - had no appreciation for tea. They attempted to seem cultured but their pretenses were so easy to break apart, see through. Since their little revolt they had abandoned the honourable practice of taking tea daily as a mark of high society and proper upbringing. Their consumption was concoctions which made Honeyduke's Fizzing Whizzbangs seem healthy, carbonated potions with sugar and nothing meaningful in their ingredients. Even worse, a sign of their complete degeneration from decent roots, was their love of coffee shoppes every few blocks. Fancy names and exorbant prices did not equate to refined tastes, no matter what they pretended. Their separation from the Crown, from an older society with traditions established through hundreds of years of history, had created some positive results (in the end) but I still maintain that a re-annexation would be for their own good.

With time, I always imagined, they could gain better tastes. Maybe it would take generations, since the de-evolution had occurred over a period of time as well, but there was hope their could eventually lose their headstrong ways. They could return to their roots - refined, if impossibly impure, roots. Fanciful, perhaps, except that any nation which considered pre-processed, soaked in chemicals and shoved inside little stapled bags, swept off the floor of a mass-producing factory to be a beverage worth drinking was in need of help. Their appreciation needed to be cultured, expanded, transformed - refined and selected from the ones displaying the best choices, a path from common to grand, acquired.

Cold fingers curled over my hand, slowly the foreign touch warming to the temperature of my skin. He moved closer, the air thickening as he shifted towards me silently. The scents he brought overwhelmed me - I could smell the bergamont, almost perfectly taste the hyssop and lavender as the smells clung to him. More tantalising than the fainter, lighter aroma of the tea he was dark and cold, complex and illusive. He was bare contact, light touch, a ghostly dream made more real by the things brought to my senses with his mere presence alone.

_He_ was my acquired taste, a mark of class that I appreciated him when so few others did. Rough, dry - when taken as an individual by single characteristics he was nothing special; separated he was unappealing or only useful. In much of the same way of the potions he devoted his life to, it was the combination of the components which were the magical keys to his being. His tongue poisonous, his hands deadly, his voice melodious, his visage disgusting - when they were given a catalyst, when he was given _me_ as a catalyst he came alive. I was the fire to stoke the passions he had buried under his harsh exterior, the element that alone transformed him from a man of bitter herbs to the perfect brew to quench my thirst.

Though he smelled of sharp contrasts - marjoram and aconite, hints of lemon verbena - against my lips he was Assam, his breath the sweet and pleasing Balm of Gilead. Always complex, never a taste I could decipher at first guess but the blend of caustic wit and furtive passions I savoured more than any. Though he blew hot and cold, unpredictable and forever a new variable to calculate, harsh and demanding in his own way I would never turn him away or abandon him. His temperament was the appeal, part of why I'd twisted him to my side in the first place.

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End file.
